Play history shows duplicate tracks were played

General Discussions
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Hi all.

I’ve been trying to clean up my library because I was having false play statistics. (see Track Play Count is off). Now that I understand what caused that issue, I have been monitoring my activity and have noticed something that I thought was odd.

If I play a track that has a clone in another album (ie: Billy Joel Songs in the Attic and Billy Joel Greatest Hits both have “She’s Got a Way”.), It shows that both tracks were played. I have my library sorted by Tracks Date Played and it shows that both tracks were played, but I only heard the song once. So in my logical mind, I think this is statistically wrong. LOL.

Here is what I just saw happen. And by the way, the titles are slightly different with capitalization, so the ID3 tags doesn’t seem to be the part that is being matched.
image

It seems someone went through a lot of trouble to determine that these tracks are identical. I find this interesting and am not complaining that this is a bug, because I think this is correct. In this case both were the live cut from the same show, same track length, etc.

I have other cases where I have multiple VERSIONS of the same song (ie: Pink Floyd Comfortably Numb) where they may be from different live concerts, or they were remastered (The Wall and Echos: The Best of Pink Floyd have different track lengths). I want to hear each version. That is why I added them to my library. These do not appear to be sharing the same play history as the other versions, so GOOD JOB on that.

So, this leads me to ask how does PLEX know that certain tracks are identical? Can I see which tracks have clones anywhere in the UI? I want to make sure it is correct. Is there way to tell PLEX that they are indeed different?

I use smart playlists that prioritize tracks that haven’t been played in a while and I want to make sure all tracks get heard. :wink:

Thanks!

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It depends on to which album record on musicbrainz.org your files were matched.
MB supports the separation of “work” and “recording”.
(Think of “work” as the composition)

So if the same song appears on MB as different “recordings”, then its 2 instances will have different identities in Plex as well.

There is no readily available way to see if there are duplicate identities of a song in Plex.
All you can do is to compare the guid of both songs. You can find this guid in the Plex mediainfo XML https://support.plex.tv/articles/201998867-investigate-media-information-and-formats/

1 Like
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Pretty cool. So MusicBrainz is the “System of Record” providing the guid for each performance? That makes sense since each live performance of a song is different, but a Greatest Hits compilation album would likely be the same performance as that of the original album.

Thanks, @OttoKerner, for your explanation.

The confusing part in the Plex UI is when you sort tracks by date played. It actually shows as if both tracks (the original track and the greatest hits track) were played, and at the same time.

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